Reuters first to hear call from Egypt reform campaigner ElBaradei for Mubarak to quit

Reuters spoke exclusively to opposition campaigner Mohammed ElBaradei on the day he returned to Cairo to demand that aging ruler Hosni Mubarak quit his post. ElBaradei called on Mubarak to quit and predicted massive demonstrations across Egypt the next day, Jan 28. Newspapers and rivals picked up those quotes which underlined our dominant start on this global story. From the first demonstrations on Tuesday Jan 25 our correspondents recognised the potential for the protests, inspired by the revolution in Tunisia, to become an uprising against Mubarak’s 30-year rule. As events that day gathered momentum, our coverage in text, pictures and video from Cairo, Suez and Alexandria noted that the demonstrations were “unprecedented”, an expression that later became commonplace. Most other media on Jan. 25 were slow to spot the potential of the story, with newspapers relegating the story in their Jan. 26 morning issues to inside pages. That day, the second day of protests, the story went global and by Jan. 27 was on newspaper front pages around the world.